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Inside the World of Conspiracy Theorists

“Among the Truthers” is a remarkable book, not least because its author, Jonathan Kay, appears to have emerged with his sanity intact after immersing himself for several years in the wilder precincts of conspiracy theories about everything from President Obama’s birthplace to 9/11 to vaccines. Like a modern-day Gulliver, he has traveled widely and conducted numerous interviews to map what seems like every nook and cranny of the conspiracist universe. Yet Kay, an editor and columnist at the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, has not written a Swiftian satire on the foibles of humanity. Rather, he sounds alarms about what he depicts as a mounting paranoia inspired by an invisible and nefarious oligarchy.

Kay usefully cautions at the outset, “Some conspiracies are very real.” Nor is the conviction that secretive elites are manipulating the destiny of the world novel. On the contrary, Kay reminds us, the belief that coastal political elites, bankers and Ivy League intellectuals are conniving to victimize ordinary people has long been a staple on the fringes of American politics. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, even claimed that Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton was in cahoots with Moscow.

But as Kay sees it, conspiracy thinking is now experiencing a dangerous uptick in popularity. The terrorist threat has replaced the Red menace, as 9/11 had nothing less than what Kay deems a “seismic” effect on America’s “collective intellect.” He devotes much attention to the “truther” movement, which contends that the United States government perpetrated the terrorist attacks.

Some of Kay’s most illuminating passages center not on what conspiracy theorists believe — even to dignify it with the word “theory” is probably to grant them more legitimacy than they deserve — but on why they are attracted to such tedious rubbish in the first place. He divides them into different camps, including the “cranks” and the “firebrands.” Cranks are often reacting to male midlife crises — combating conspiracies, Kay says, offers a new sense of mission. Cranks, he adds, are frequently math teachers, computer scientists or investigative journalists.

A leading case, according to Kay, is David Ray Griffin, a former professor at the Claremont School of Theology who has devoted his retirement to writing no fewer than 11 books that examine each minute of the 9/11 timeline. Then there is Paul Zarembka, a professor of economics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, who has scrutinized “such arcane subjects as the price of individual airline stocks in the run-up to 9/11, and the tail numbers of the hijacked 9/11 aircraft.” And Barrie Zwicker, a mainstream Canadian journalist turned truther, insisted on interviewing Kay while Kay was interviewing him, hitting buttons on a chess clock to regulate the amount of time each had.

Once upon a time such people would most likely have operated in relative anonymity. But with the emergence of the Internet, Kay says, they have established their own cult followings, along with the sense of superiority that is created by seeming to enjoy direct access to what actually makes the world tick. Kay writes: “Many true conspiracy theorists I’ve met don’t even bother with Web surfing anymore. . . . From the very instant they first boot up their computer in the morning, their in-boxes comprise an unbroken catalog of outrage stories ideologically tailored to their pre-existing obsessions.” As Kay sees it, the Enlightenment is itself at stake. His verdict could hardly be more categorical: “It is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities.”

But is America really in such dire straits? Hardly. Kay’s description sounds more reminiscent of Weimar Germany or other societies in a state of intellectual collapse than the habitual din and hubbub of American democracy. In concentrating so narrowly on truthers, Kay describes them superbly, but he may exaggerate their potential influence. He asserts but does not demonstrate that 9/11 “has had far-reaching social, political and psychological consequences that have yet to be fully absorbed or understood.”

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Then there is the problem of organization. At times, Kay’s book can itself appear almost as convoluted as a conspiracy flowchart. He has a habit of hopscotching between topics and eras. It would also have been helpful had he drawn a clearer distinction between the muckraker, who exposes unpleasant truths, and the conspiracist, who weaves them into a fantastic plot aimed at deceiving the credulous.

Kay is forthright about chronicling loopi­ness on the right as well as the left. But he claims that the snobbish liberal media are at least partly culpable for the right’s zaniness, because they don’t treat its suspicions with more deference; this is special pleading. He also rehearses the chestnut that liberal intellectual skepticism has degenerated into nihilism, creating a relativistic world in which one opinion is as good as another. And he rather sweepingly writes that “modern academics tend to romanticize the conspiracy theorist.”

Still, Kay ends on an admirable note. As his research progressed, he came to realize that his initial assumption that a distinct class of pathological crazies could be identified was mistaken. “This realization,” he writes, “has taught me to be careful about my own ideological commitments. . . . It has made me more self-aware when I bend the rules of logic in the service of ideology or partisanship.” In a book that often suggests the grown-ups are not all right, it’s a refreshingly mature confession.

AMONG THE TRUTHERS

A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground

By Jonathan Kay

340 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

Jacob Heilbrunn is a regular contributor to the Book Review and a senior editor at The National Interest.

A version of this review appears in print on May 15, 2011, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Paranoid Style. Today's Paper|Subscribe